Bjarke Ingels, image © Dan Winters

Bjarke Ingels is fond of saying that architecture is “the art of turning fiction into fact.” He boasts many talents—as a draftsman, as a salesman, as the charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is a gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a narrative around practical necessities. Often his designs careen in fantastical directions. He is currently building a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen with a slanted roof that will serve as a recreational ski slope and a smokestack that will puff a symbolic ring of steam each time it emits a ton of carbon dioxide. For a proposed expansion of Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels (along with collaborator Thomas Heatherwick) created a wildly elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding inside a sunlit glass terrarium. Such imaginative flights have made Ingels famous—and highly sought-after—at an age considered precocious by architecture standards. But fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession: An architect’s work, like the light of a star, only reaches the eye after a years-long journey.......Continue Reading

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